Anonymous Rating Fails
The irony of a one-star Glassdoor rating for a culture-driven company
Glassdoor profiles have become table stakes for being considered a “legitimate” company to many applicants. As a nascent company, wanting to present as a “credible” place to work to prospective recruits, we set up a profile for RiverNorth. A few of our candidates were kind enough to submit reviews for our friendly and transparent interview process, but as of October 2020, we had yet to hire any full-time employees outside of the RiverNorth founders. To our surprise, this did not prevent us from receiving the following review:
And then a couple months later, more reviews for the wrong “River North” came in…apparently River North is not as unique a name as we thought (see River North Chicago)…but we digress…
This was a personal favorite, at least they gave us two stars…
Now, we pride ourselves on our approachability and willingness to be Challenged, but it’s a little difficult when we have no idea who wrote it, knowing full well that this individual did not work for us. After several attempts to have the erroneous review removed by Glassdoor, we were informed that it did not violate any of the review guidelines, despite being able to provide evidence to the contrary. We then learned that we couldn’t delete/re-create the business account, as that would not serve to preserve all the reviews of our company.
This got us to thinking…what is the purpose in so fervently protecting the anonymity of a company review? Glassdoor doesn’t provide the option to share your name, all reviews are anonymous by default.
If you’re one of the first employees in a particular level, they even obscure your provided salary information so that it cannot be easily associated with you.
This anonymity equally protects positive/negative reviews, with no way to certify that you actually work(ed) for the company, be they truthful or fraudulent, so what is the point? Glassdoor has apparently decided for you that you should be afraid to stand behind your feedback - we’ve personally known individuals hold off on submitting negative company reviews for fear that they wouldn’t be “truly anonymous.”
So, now what? The four RiverNorth founders could each submit glowing reviews to boost our rating out of “Don’t Work Here” one-star levels (as many companies do when they receive negative ratings), but that goes directly against our principles of wholeness and transparency.
Instead, we’re choosing to lean in hard to our fake 1-star review status and Challenge the Current feedback culture…If you want to air a grievance with your employer, feel free to do so on our Glassdoor profile, we would love to share how we would approach the same situation. We clearly don’t have any control over the accuracy of reviews on our site, we might as well help some people.